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5 Ways to Create a Healthy and Positive Workplace

Creating a healthy and positive workplace is crucial for ensuring the success of your business. Building this environment will have a positive effect on your employee’s overall wellbeing, in turn increasing their motivation.

With increased motivation, your business will experience higher levels of productivity, efficiency, and effectiveness as well as lower levels of staff turn-over and absenteeism.

It is important to look after both the physical and the mental health of your staff, making sure your company has effective policies and procedures in place which help to prevent and manage risks around these aspects. Seek a professional opinion if you have a staff member that continues to have pain or discomfort.

Here are 5 ways to help guide your business in the right direction for creating a healthy and positive workplace.

Empower Each other
Creating an environment where you empower each other, builds confidence which increases motivation. This will have a positive effect on employees’ overall performance.

When managers encourage employees with new opportunities for growth, and praise their accomplishments, this improves employee wellbeing, which in turn increases employee satisfaction.

Leaders who lead by example have a positive impact on employees. Communicating the company vision and values, followed with practising them, will create a ripple effect on employees. These behaviours will become the norm and staff will follow suit and contribute to the company culture and adding to the overall positive and healthy working environment.

Build Trust
Your business should aim to create a safe working environment where employees are able to have a voice. Employees should feel safe sharing their opinions and ideas. Through fostering open communication, you will build trust between employees and management, which will have a positive effect on staff members mental well-being.

Management should aim to keep promises (not over promise and under deliver), take accountability, be open and honest, and fair with all actions. Safe failure should also be encouraged, where employees have a safe space to make mistakes without putting the company in danger.

This enables them to feel comfortable sharing mistakes with you, creating opportunities for learning and growth. Building trust will improve job satisfaction, in turn increasing productivity.

Illness Prevention
Both injuries and illnesses within the workplace pose a huge threat on lost costs due to decreased productivity and increased absenteeism. These risks are even larger when an illness has entered the workplace as it can infect multiple people. It is therefore very important to follow the right procedures for preventing and eliminating illnesses at work.

Steps your company can take to prevent and decrease the spread of illnesses include:
• Educate your workforce: Have an illness plan in place and communicate this back to your employees.
• Keep hands and surfaces clean (provide paper towels, soaps, and hand sanitisers).
• Sneeze and cough into your elbow.
• Work from home if you are feeling ill.

Companies need to be proactive in offering various solutions which can be rotated throughout the year to minimise injuries.

Injury Prevention
Steps your company can take to prevent staff members getting injured include the following:
• Identifying and eliminating potential working hazards within your line of work.
• Creating prevention procedures for these hazards.
• Staff training: ensuring staff are properly trained in operating equipment and completing tasks.
• Provide all equipment needed to complete tasks safely, which are in good condition.
• Have regular health and safety meetings to communicate these procedures back to your employees, and to discuss issues around these, continuously seeking further improvements. This allows employees to report potential hazards they come across on the job that may not have been identified, as well as sharing their experiences with others to build awareness.

Labour
It is key to consider possible long-term effects which labour can have on your employees and not just instant injuries. A big concern is neck and back problems which is a risk within most companies, whether due to heavy lifting or sitting for too long at desks.

In light of these types of issues, your company will need to be proactive in offering various solutions which can be rotated throughout the year to minimise these damaging effects.

VariDesk, for example is a company who offers stand up desk solutions which create healthier and more productive workspaces.